But while Madden gets much of the attention in the United States, EA’s real heavyweight is the soccer game EA FC. (The game was formerly known as FIFA, before EA’s partnership with the FIFA organization ended in 2022.) FC is notorious for minting money through a game-within-the-game called Ultimate Team, where players can spend endless amounts of money for packs of digital “cards” that represent individual soccer players. The players in those packs are random, as are their stats, which gives Ultimate Team players a slot machine-like compulsion. They want to acquire cards of their favorite players, but also the best version of their favorite players, because winning games will get a player even more cards. It’s ingenious, terribly extractive, and almost every major sports game on the market has a feature like this now—but FC has long been the most profitable of them all.
All of these assets make EA an appealing blue-chip acquisition for private equity investment, especially since, as the Financial Times reports, those investors believe that the company’s operating costs can be lowered significantly with the use of AI. (A claim no one in the games industry has managed to deliver on just yet.) EA’s sports games also dovetail nicely with both the Crown Prince’s real-world soccer efforts and his nation’s continued gaming investments, which seek to further entangle the nation with the global economy and ultimately lure jobs to Riyadh.
The irony here is that the video game industry, like so many corners of entertainment and culture, is in trouble. Traditional games have struggled in the wake of “games as a service” like Roblox and Fortnite, which let users play for free but charge fees for subscriptions and in-game merchandise, with exclusive merch sold during limited-time brand collaboration events. Old-fashioned games are expensive to make and can take years to produce; they are a high-risk industry where all parties involved are uniquely vulnerable, and in dire need of the sort of cash Saudi investors have been happy to spend in nearly every field.
On September 28, Saudi Arabia announced its latest endeavor: the Saudi Film Fund’s rebrand as Riviera Content, with new investments totalling $32.5 million Saudi riyal (about $8.7 million USD). Universal Studios and Columbia Pictures were both named as collaborators in the fund. It’s a smaller data point than the EA purchase, but these announcements are all of a piece, and all examples of money spent for the same purpose. The goal here seems to be for Saudi Arabia to be as inescapable as the oil that gave the nation its wealth to begin with—to have a hand in everything you see on a screen or in an arena, to put its dollars into things you can’t live without. So that, by extension, you can’t live without Saudi Arabia—and whatever Saudi Arabia chooses to do with its power.
